Southern history belongs in museum

Confederate flags do flutter in Portales.

At least two stores — appealing to Johnny Rebels Without a Cause for Self-Esteem — display them. On Memorial Day, several waved at the Confederate monument in the Portales Cemetery.

Some say the flag symbolizes Southern heritage — even though that heritage encompasses the ugliest era in American history.

Try convincing the ancestors of concentration camp victims the swastika is merely an ancient religious symbol adapted to reflect German pride.

No matter what the symbols originally represented, they now represent a Confederacy of Dunces.

While attending this year’s Clovis High School Hall of Honor banquet, I met retired Air Force and American Airlines pilot Tom Rodgers — the son-in-law of Clovis’ Patricia Doran.

Rodgers, who flew 101 combat missions in Vietnam, has strong feelings about Confederate symbols.

“No matter what deniers say, the Civil War was fought over the ‘right’ of one human to own another,” Rodgers said. “That war nearly destroyed our great experiment in democracy.”

The Louisiana State University graduate — who never attended school with an African-American before college — says there is a big difference between “public spaces” and museums.

“The former belongs to and is for the use of all people. A museum is a place where people can see all manners of artifacts, hopefully, in a historically correct context,” Rodgers said.

The retired lieutenant colonel says the Confederate Battle Flag and Confederate monuments are symbolic reminders of when our nation was consumed by a war that killed more Americans than all our other wars combined.

“These monuments were mostly erected during the period of Jim Crow following the end of Reconstruction. They were meant to glorify a lost cause and a lost way of life, while reminding those that won that the ‘South will rise again.’

“They glorified soldiers and generals who fought against the Union. Though they may have been brave warriors, they were in no way ‘patriots.’ They fought to destroy our nation.”

Rodgers, the son of an oilman who moved the family during the segregation era to Texas, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, says the Confederate Battle Flag is not what its proponents say.

“It is the banner that Southern forces fought under, and it has a place in history — just like the Nazi swastika — but not in public spaces. It became a true icon of racism when it was co-opted by the Ku Klux Klan and other far right ‘nationalist’ organizations in the ’50s and ’60s.”

Rodgers says one person’s hero may represent another’s oppressor. Symbols of pride to some can be threatening to others, implying, “You will never be equal — never welcome at the table.”

Attending college with David Duke, whom displayed white-supremacist symbols on campus, Rodgers says we should learn from our past “in museums where fiction is weeded from fact.

“We should never try to erase history,” Rodgers said. “Conversely, we should not worship failed history and a lost cause — a history and cause that nearly destroyed our nation.”

Contact Wendel Sloan at: [email protected]